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Sunday, April 24, 2005

No Blackberrys in the Paw-Paw Patch

This weekend El Jefe and I joined a group of friends for a road trip to Natchez. I had hoped to find some dogwood in bloom and I did! Dogwood doesn't bloom as far west as we live.

The trip couldn't have been better: the spring weather was sensational! We are all history buffs and toured some of the historical sites in the area and stayed at a charming old inn downtown.

But El Jefe found one problem in the trip: there was no wireless service in the paw-paw patch. For those of you fortunate enough not to know, a blackberry is not a summer fruit, but is a devilish wireless device that sends and receives email messages, accesses the internet and is also a cellphone. All of the attorneys at his firm are issued one and I have named him the president of Blackberrys Anonymous.

These things are highly addictive: once you get used to wearing one you are constantly feeling its vibration that signals someone wants you for something. The girls and I have been known to forcibly take the device from him as he tried to read and send emails while driving, in church, or at a social event. Ignoring it is nearly as impossible as ignoring a ringing phone. I'm working on the 12 step program for blackberry addicts, and the first step is, when you shouldn't be answering it TURN IT OFF!

El Jefe did really well once he realized that the wireless network did not extend to the paw paw patch. After wistfully checking it in several new locations once we got to Natchez he finally turned it off, although he did absent-mindedly reach for it several times. He didn't try to look at it again until this afternoon when we got back to the interstate highway. Then when he turned it on it buzzed and spit like an angry hornet as it sent and received the stored messages that came in when the device was out of range of the network.

As technology develops to keep us in constant communication, it can sometimes be a blessing when it doesn't work. Thank God there was no blackberry access in the paw-paw patch this weekend!

3 comments:

Praise God for time off the grid! I have a week coming up and am looking forward to it.Have you read Barbara Brown Taylor's little book,When God is Silent? She has a section about the way the world has been changed by cell phones, how suddenly we are all *so* important, *all* the time.I have a lawyer friend who would benefit from a local chapter of BA.